It is International Perimenopause Awareness Month! For me, perimenopause has shaped the woman I am today. After more than a decade of sorrow and mounting health issues, I was fortunate to turn my experience into strength—and into a fire to inform other women. I couldn’t save my own family and domestic life, but I hope I can help save others.
This is my story.
Perimenopause cost me my family, my marriage and my self-respect. From the age of 37, I started experiencing increasing PMS symptoms. Agitation, irritability, as if all my nerves were open. More and more often I lay awake nights because my head just kept spinning around, which didn't improve my mood.
How many times did I go to the GP? I was advised to go to yoga, I was given oxazepam for the heavy moments, eventually an antidepressant. That didn't prevent me from running through the house stomping and screaming the week and later even two weeks before my period. I became furious over nothing. And felt desperate.
Fire spurted from my eyes, poison from my keyboard, something that cost me several clients.
I thought I couldn't do it, motherhood.
Strange thought. At that time I had been a mother for thirteen years, I had three children. It had always been busy, but I always managed just fine. Until then. I also thought my relationship no longer meant anything.
And I got divorced, fled in a crush on another man. In co-parenting, I would hopefully do better as a mother. In doing so, I lost the respect of everyone around me. Myself included. I had abandoned my children. That's how it was seen.
And that's how I felt myself, for ten years. And so did the children. A traumatic experience for them, which I have felt crushingly guilty about all this time. Two years ago, I reached menopause and started taking bioidentical hormones.
The initial aggravation threw me back ten years. The agitation returned, like a caged wild animal. This was it, I thought, this is why I left home! It had been the hormones all along!
Since then, I have been on a mission. All women need to know this, and GPs and gynaecologists need to be retrained at a rapid pace. I look back with pity and compassion on the 40-year-old woman I was. I was treading water in the ocean, and I drowned.
With that, a lot of sadness is also released. For the first time, I feel that I also lost my family. Something I never wanted.
For my podcast We’re Not Crazy, Are We? I’ve interviewed nearly fifty menopause specialists, as well as countless women from around the world. The funny thing is: everyone thinks menopause care must be better elsewhere. Australia seems like the Walhalla—they even have testosterone made specifically for women! And then there’s the United States, home to many of the well-known menopause experts from the “Meno Posse”, with leading figures like Kelly Casperson, MD, Heather Hirsch MD MS MSCP, Dr. Mary Claire Haver, MD.
Recently, I was interviewed for the California-based podcast Project m(e). The host, Sascha Vrolijk, told me that—apart from the Meno Posse—menopause care in the United States is actually even more conservative than in the Netherlands.
Of course, that isn’t funny at all. Around 80% of women experience menopause symptoms, yet only 4% receive treatment—in both the Netherlands and the US. Before the misinterpreted WHI study in 2002, roughly 65% of women worldwide used HRT. Most of them stopped, or were forced to stop. Since then, antidepressant prescriptions have risen by 60%. But antidepressants don’t fix problems caused by declining hormones. Only restoring your hormones does—and doing so brings major health benefits for bones, heart health, brain function, mood, joints, and even the prevention of chronic disease.
To help close this knowledge gap—including among GPs and gynecologists who are simply not trained in menopause care—I co-wrote an ebook with GP Lotte van Dijk. It’s a practical resource packed with up-to-date insights on symptoms, treatment options, and the real role of hormones.Lotte van Dijk was driven to act when, last year, she experienced severe perimenopausal symptoms that shook the very foundation of her everyday life. She had to learn through my podcast what was happening to her.Why hadn’t this been covered more thoroughly during her GP training?Since then, she’s become a vocal advocate—especially on LinkedIn—campaigning for greater awareness among GPs and gynaecologists. Because this is something every doctor should know.
Connected Health Weekend with Louise Newson
One last thing I am extremely proud of: together with Penny Pijnenburg and Nicolette Lazarus of Womanship, we succeeded in bringing menopause specialist Louise Newson to Amsterdam. She will be speaking at the Connected Health Weekend, September 27–28, alongside several leading voices from the podcast: gynecologist Herman Depypere, menopause and functional medicine specialist Nora Hendriks, gynecologist Liselotte Robbe, and urologist Melianthe Nicolaï. Immerse yourself in the most cutting-edge, evidence-based knowledge on Mind, Body & Hormones. You can join as well—all lectures will be in English!
Special discount codes
* Weekend ticket (Sat 27 & Sun 28 Sept): use code WEEKEND for €100 off
* Saturday ticket (27 Sept): use code SATURDAY for €55 off
* Sunday ticket (28 Sept): use code SUNDAY for €55 off
As a thank you for your support on my Substack, paying members will receive a complimentary copy of our ebook The Perimenopause Unravelled. Click here for the English version and here for the Dutch version.
The guide is also available to purchase separately through my website or through Lotte’s website.
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